The psychological secrets behind improving work performance: the individual and cumulative effects of employees pursuing intrinsic and extrinsic goals

摘要

Hooking into the motivations and goal orientations of employees is a way of finding out how they might be able to add more value to the organization; yet, the impact of employee goal orientations on work performance remains underresearched. A research paper by Zhang et al. (2018) therefore aims to, first, explore how intrinsic and extrinsic goal orientations impact different categories of work performance and, second, the effect on work performance when both of these goal types interact. Questionnaire data were collected from 319 participants working across a range of companies in China. Employees were asked about their work goals, whereas their managers were asked questions about assessing work performance in their team.